The last exhibition in 2016 at the Darkroom gallery presents Caligari and the Sleepwalker (Caligari und der Schlafwander, 2008) by Javier Téllez. The work is based on the 1920 classic silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by Robert Wiene, generally considered a landmark of horror fiction and German Expressionism.

In
Wiene’s original version, the cabinet of the mysterious Dr. Caligari
features Cesare, a sleepwalker who can see the future and answer
questions about it, but who also serves under hypnosis as the instrument
of arbitrary murders for the doctor. The open ending of the film turns
the story upside down, however: was everything ultimately only insanity
and delusion of which the director of the mental hospital, Dr. Caligari,
was trying to relieve the patient?

The son of two
psychiatrists himself, Javier Téllez has had a privileged view of the
many dimensions of the human psyche, its norms and disorders. In his
artistic practice, he has given voice to mental patients and people with
disabilities who would otherwise remain invisible or marginalised. Caligari and the Sleepwalker is
another such work, created in collaboration with amateur actors and
mental health patients in a workshop held at the Vivantes clinic in
Berlin. The patients collaborated in the scripting of the film, the
development of its characters as well as casting and acting. The key
location is the solar observatory known as Einstein Turm, an iconic
piece of German avant-garde architecture designed by Erich Mendelsohn.
The presence of the building in the film is a reference to Wiene’s
aesthetics but also to the era when psychiatric research and
psychoanalysis were taking huge leaps forward and mental disorders and
mental institutions were brought to the silver screen for the first
time.

Caligari and the Sleepwalker explores
the concepts of otherness, doppelgangers and schizophrenia by depicting,
in classic silent film style, strange sessions between Cesare, a
creature from outer space, and his psychiatrist. Like its inspiration,
Téllez’s work plays with role inversion and the idea of fantasy within
fantasy. At the same time, he also reveals to us the essence of cinema
as a kind of illusion that mesmerises us into believing for a moment in
things that are not real.

Javier Téllez (b. 1969 in Valencia,
Venezuela) lives and works in New York. He is known for video and film
works that combine elements from fiction and documentary films in order
to re-evaluate and challenge our notions of normality.